Word: drabs
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...post-Revolution years they advocated easy liaisons. Many couples married themselves by "solemn agreements," while others, who had tired of their mates, merely called the district party chief and announced that they considered themselves divorced. Tiring came quickly in societies where privacy is almost impossible, diversions drab, and the outlook for the future grey and bleak. Nor did such prospects encourage bringing new lives into the world...
...impinges on 1968-in the aluminum façades of antiseptic buildings, in the whir of computers, and in the human automatons who face their drab jobs with all the relish of zombies. That at least seems to be the view of Sebastian, a film that attempts to analyze the mind-numbing effects of a Pentagonal bureaucracy on a brilliant civil servant...
...were in the country, all right, but traffic hadn't improved. The roads out of Saigon are long extended sheets of olive-drab and camouflaged steel armaments--tanks, truck convoys, rifles, soldiers, fortified bridges, occasional burnt-out vehicles. Everything and everybody had an edgy dug-in look. In any direction you looked you could find a column of smoke or a helicopter hovering over a fixed spot...
Adzope is one of a score of drab, sprawling towns which you pass on the Ivory Coast's main highway north of Abidjan. The West African countryside is absolutely flat, and in the thick coastal forest the town is invisible until a turn in the road brings you into the center. Then suddenly the wall of the trees opens up, and there is a glimpse of long dirt roads, gas station signs and telephone poles, laundry spread out on the grass to dry, and people walking past rows of identical shops stacked with bright plastic washtubs. The reflection...
...departure of Mr. McNamara, my boss for the past two years, I should like to make a few observations on our era: glamour and personality, petty and inconsequential qualities seem to play much too great a role in the selection of our national leaders. Mr. McNamara, with his drab, oldfashioned, almost spartan public image, has proved a welcome and competent exception to the rule. His unquestioned integrity, coupled with his demonstrated ability, loyalty and courage, mark him as one of the truly unsung heroes of our time. It is regrettable that such enormous talents are to be relegated...